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Once, picking the spot was fairly easy and cheap. Wildcatters drilled where they could find oil seeping from the ground. Now, drilling for oil is highly complicated and expensive, especially the way Amerada does it. Oilmen have suspected for years that there was oil in the Williston Basin. A saucerlike underground formation, the basin is composed of sedimentary strata which were once the bottom of a prehistoric sea—the type of formation in which oil is found.
But no one could find oil in the Williston. After independent wildcatters had failed. Standard of California tried its luck in 1938. It went down 10,281 ft. before it gave up. Then in 1946 Amerada got interested. In buying a block of leases it got some that Standard had let lapse on the area known as the Nesson Anticline (see chart), a gently sloping dome of rock. (The surface anticline, i.e., an upward fold of porous rock, often indicates a similar undergound dome under which oil frequently is imprisoned.) With the first batch of leases in its pocket, Amerada sent brokers all over the area, leasing more thousands of acres of land. Says Jacobsen: "When you make a big play, you have to be sure you'll have plenty of land to drill if you find oil. And you have to get your land first, if you want to get it at a reasonable price."
Shock Troops. Not until he had about 400,000 acres under lease did Jacobsen send in his teams of geologists and geophysicists to map the surface and underground strata. By such tricks as drilling shallow holes and setting off dynamite in them, the geophysicists could time the shock waves through the ground, thus guess at the type of rock, shale or sand strata through which the waves were passing. For four years the teams mapped the area. Then the results were studied for months by Amerada's Dr. Benjamin B. Weatherby, one of the top geophysicists of the industry.
What Dr. Weatherby and staff were looking for was the peak of the underground dome. When this area was plotted on an ordinary contour map, it was time for Jacobsen & Co. to weigh all the geologic and other factors and make the final decision to drill. The big work was preparing the maps and locating the possible oil-bearing area; picking the spot to drill was easy. Says Jacobsen: "Any office boy at Amerada could have done that because you drill in the peak of the dome. As long as you stay in that area you could pick your spot by the Sam Weaver method."*
The Squeeze. The spot picked was on the farm of Clarence Iverson, 30 miles northeast of Williston. By the time Amerada had hired the crew of drillers, it had spent more than $500,000 just for geophysical work and leases. By the time the well was down to 11,700 ft., it had spent another $500,000. On April 5, 1951, the Iverson discovery well came in and North Dakota became the 27th U.S. state to yield oil.
Why did Amerada succeed where others failed?